John Buys Comics and it Feels So Good

Crogan’s March

If you’re not in the know about this series (The Crogan Adventures by Chris Schweizer), it’s about a guy telling his two sons stories about their ancestors, who were evidently all incredibly cool guys - the family tree at the front of the book includes a smuggler, a lion tamer and a WWI pilot, for example (and speaking of the family tree, Schweizer does and incredible job of making a pretty diverse bunch of guys look like they’re related. I’ve been staring at them for a while now and I think that it’s all in the eyebrows). Crogan’s Vengeance, the first in the series, came outlast year and was a very fun story about “Catfoot” Crogan, pirate, the first of the line. Crogan’s Vengeance was a fine comic, heck, a great comic, but Crogan’s March is MAGNIFICENT. I decided to pick up some Turkish food on the way back from the comic shoppe last night and cracked open Crogan’s March while I waited, and I have never in my life cared less about how long my food was going to take to get ready.

Peter Crogan is a Corporal in the French Foreign Legion, with two months left on his five-year tour. He’s a crack shot (when he’s standing still) a former boxer and an all-around good guy who just happens to be smack in the middle of one of the more violent spots in the days of the European Empires. He’s the kind of character that you like from panel one onward and he has a magnificent mustache.

Oh, and every other character in the book is immensely likeable as well. Schweizer makes each character distinct in both look and personality, to the extent that one of my favourite characters had maybe two lines and then died - I could just tell that he was terrific. Some of the characters from Crogan’s Vengeance get Blackadder-esque cameos as background and minor characters as well, which is great, particularly as Peter Crogan gets to lay a haymaker on a guy who is a double of his ancestor’s arch-enemy. Time-spanning family rivalry, woo!

And there’s a very thoughtful exploration of colonialism going on here too, and not the COLONIALISM IS ALL BAD ALL THE TIME blanket statement that I encountered with dreary regularity in my days as an English major - not that it wasn’t pretty damn terrible in most respects, don’t get me wrong. It’s just nice to read a work that sets that aside and instead looks at the differing motivations that the people who were involved in the process had. The differing opinions that Crogan’s superiors hold on this topic inform a lot of the book’s conflict.

Oh, man. I can look forward to a new Crogan Adventure every year so hard.

World of New Krypton No 12 - It was a mystery all along! Well, I guess I knew that, but it was a proper mystery, with clues and everything! And now Superman’s solved it! Hooray! You know, if New Krypton is still around in a year or so a series about trying to be a detective on a planet of supermans could be a pretty fun time.

Casper and the Spectrals No. 1 - This actually came out a while ago but I didn’t see it until yesterday and I just had to see what they’d done to the old Harvey crew. Have to say: not too bad. The character designs aren’t aggressively weird (and it was high time that Hot Stuff stopped wearing a diaper, let me tell you) although Wendy’s eyes, even by the standards of manga-influenced comic characters, are unnervingly gigantic. I’m pretty certain that she has at least a 270 degree field of vision. So, I'm not going to keep buying it, but I guess that it's a pretty decent modernization of the junk I read as a kid.

Doom Patrol No. 7 - Crazy Jane is back! Animal-Mineral-Vegetable Man is back! The Metal Men defeat Giganta in an unusual manner! Fun!

Red Robin No. 9 - I just keep enjoying this series more and more. Tim’s dropped a lot of his angst since he found the Bat-cave painting, he’s owning up to the fact that he looks like Dr Mid-Nite and he’s starting to react to some of the things that he’s been up to in other peoples’ comics (like being a bit of a dick to Superboy, say). It was a bit of a breather issue, a between story arcs kind of thing, but those are the kinds of issues where you really get a chance to enjoy a character sans drama, so hurrah.

Sweet Tooth No. 6 - Sorry Tiina. He didn’t get adopted by a nice family and get to play with a dog all day. Maybe next issue? 

Underappreciated Comic Movie Showcase: Punisher War Zone

I enjoyed a pretty great haul for my birthday yesterday. My girlfriend Hillary gave me socks (I go through an alarming number of these), a Dairy Queen ice cream cake, a copy of Peter Biskind’s Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced Hollywood (I have a weakness for trashy Hollywood memoirs, and Biskind never disappoints), Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell (how come more people didn’t see this?), and one of the most criminally underappreciated comic-to-film adaptations of all time…Punisher: War Zone. The fact that I already didn’t own this movie on DVD is a bit embarrassing, because I think I’ve seen it three times already. It’s easily the best of the three Punisher movies, although that’s not really saying much. It tanked pretty hard at the box office, thanks to a combination of awful reviews and a cast with very little marquee value. I sadly missed it in the theatre; it didn’t play anywhere near me, and when Hillary and I were in Toronto for Christmas of 2008, we opted for Slumdog Millionaire instead, to my eternal regret. 

I’m not going to make an argument that Punisher: War Zone is a faithful adaptation of the comic or anything. No one’s going to accuse me of being a huge Punisher fan—I liked the character’s old Amazing Spider-Man appearances as an occasional supporting badass, I enjoyed Garth Ennis’s ultraviolent interpretation, and I’m loving the ridiculousness of the current Franken-Castle arc by Rick Remender and Tony Moore, but I don’t generally go out of my way to read about the character. In fact, I would recommend War Zone more for fans of insanely excessive Reagan-era action films like Commando or Rambo: First Blood Part II rather than a faithful page-to-screen translation.

Punisher: War Zone isn’t really a sequel to either the 1989 Dolph Lundgren direct-to-video interpretation or the 2004 Thomas Jane stinkbomb, nor is it concerned with rebooting the franchise or whatever. The Punisher, AKA Frank Castle, is a guy whose family was killed by the mob, so now he wears a skull and kills bad guys 24-7, and that’s all you need to know. This time around, the title character is played by Ray Stevenson, better known as Titus Pullo on HBO’s short-lived but vastly entertaining Rome series. There isn’t a lot of range to this performance, but really, how much do you need? Stevenson looks like he basically wants to throttle everyone around him all the time, which is about right I guess. Castle’s war on crime eventually brings him up against a vain, preening mob boss played by another welcome HBO face, Dominic West (McNutty from The Wire!). Castle drops the guy into some sort of bottle-recycling contraption, but he survives and is reborn as Jigsaw, a leather-faced creep bent on revenge. Jigsaw busts his even crazier brother, Loony Bin Jim (another cult favourite—Doug Hutchison, who you might remember as Eugene Victor Tooms from a couple of X-Files episodes, or more recently as Horace Goodspeed from Lost’s Dharma Initiative), out of an asylum to help dispatch the Punisher. Castle’s thinking about hanging up the skull-shirt once and for all after accidentally killing an undercover police officer, but when Jigsaw and his bro threaten the dead cop’s wife and kid, the Punisher finds it within himself to kill again. And again, and again, and…well, you get the idea.

Directed by Lexi Alexander, Punisher: War Zone is a surprisingly beautiful movie, given the lurid subject matter. It’s shot in an eye-catching pallet of vivid primary colours, in a tip of the hat to the movie’s comic book origins. There are nods to several of the comic’s incarnations as well—the Punisher employs hapless detective Martin Soap (Dash Mihok) as his inside man in the police department, while utilizing the technological skills of his pal Microchip (played by Newman himself, Wayne Knight!). Unlike the previous two Punisher films, though, War Zone refuses to take itself too seriously; the tone is very tongue-in-cheek without totally veering into silliness. West and Hutchison appear to be having a blast, hamming it up to beat the band (the scene where they travel around the city recruiting gangs of ethnic stereotypes with a rabble-rousing speech—in front of a flapping American flag, no less—is worth the price of admission). Any movie that features a Parkour-based gang, one with a hilarious name like the Urban Free Flow Gang, is clearly not out to win any Oscars.

Did I mention the violence, by the way? This is possibly the most gleefully gory movie since Starship Troopers. Castle dispatches his enemies with rocket launchers, chair legs, and good ol’ fashioned shotgun blasts to the face. Loony Bin Jim appears to disembowel and maybe even partly devour a hospital orderly with his bare hands, and the origin of Jigsaw involves a whole lotta broken glass being mashed into Dominic West’s face. If you’ve got a weak stomach, maybe you might want to skip this movie altogether, but if you have a taste for cartoonish, borderline NC-17 mayhem, you’ll have a blast. Might I recommend a few drinks to enchance the experience? And, if you’re ever faced with the same choice as me—Slumdog Millionaire vs. Punisher: War Zone—please, don’t make the same mistake I did. I mean, does Slumdog Millionaire have a Parkour guy getting blown to pieces mid-leap by a rocket launcher? I don’t think so!

Ladies' Night at the Comic Shop

Last week, at Strange Adventures (the comic shop that keeps this blog knee-deep in Superman), we held our first ever Ladies' Night. Thursday evening, after regular store hours ended, Ladies' Night began. No dudes were allowed, and anyone who considers themselves a woman was welcomed in. It was only lady staff members working, and even the owner, Cal, was sent to near by bar to read comics and hang out with any dads, boyfriends or brothers who were dropping ladies off at the store.

The idea behind this event was that, I've found, when talking to women about comics, a lot of them tend to be super interested and excited about comics, but unsure where to start, and nervous about going into a shop and asking for recommendations. I love comics, and I work in comic shop, but I've still felt weird, uncomfortable and frustrated going into other shops. Why would I want some douche talking down to me about comics—something I love, and something that's supposed to fun? While I think Strange Adventures works pretty hard to be a welcoming place for anyone, all the time, comic shops on the whole tend to be unpleasant places for women. So we wanted a night where women could come in and browse, and ask myself and the other lady staff members for recommendations. 

Besides introducing the uninitiated to comics, we also wanted a night where women who are big comic fans could hang out, eat some snacks, get some freebies and buy some stuff on sale. Strange Adventures has quite a few women customers, and we thought it would be fun for them to get to meet each other.

So we bought snacks (chocolate—'cause ladies love that stuff, right?), made up a bunch of gift bags, did up a display of comics by female creators and comics that might appeal to women, sent the dudes away, opened the doors at 7pm and....

IT! WAS! OFF! THE! HOOK!

The first hour, the store was wall to wall, full of people. Our shop isn't huge, but you literally couldn't turn around without bumping into someone. We had over an hundred women in the store during this two hour event, and, if you're interested in bottom line, we made about as much money as we do on a busy Saturday, in a quarter of the time. It was insanely awesome.

People were seriously so stoked, to the point where one lady was shaking my hand, thanking me excitedly, saying, "I'm forty-five years old and I've never been a comic shop before! I love this stuff, but I've always felt too scared! You ladies are amazing!" I felt like someone paid her to come tell me exactly what I wanted to hear.

 After the first hour, the crowd settled into a busy-but-less-insane level, and I was actually able to make recommendations and have some good talks with people. We sold tons of stuff by women creators—lots of Alison Bechdel, and Faith Erin Hicks, who was at the event, hanging out and talking to ladies. Lots of Brian K. Vaughn, Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon went too, and then all sorts of other stuff—almost as much variety as on a normal day.

It was nice to see solid proof of what I already know: women like comics! They like all different kinds of comics! They want to buy comics, so stop actively discouraging them! The masses of women that came to this event really showed how much it was needed. Everyone kept asking when the next Ladies' Night would be.

I know the comics industry is still a total sausage fest. It's changing, for sure, but it needs a big push. And as someone on the retail end of things, I'm trying my best to help.

You can check out more pictures on the Strange Adventures site, and read some press here and here. 

Lazy Picture Quiz Saturday

I spent an hour or so chipping ice off of a sidewalk yesterday, and as a consequence my fingers aren't working quite as well as they usually do. Also, the rest of my arms. Here, instead, is my one-panel picture quiz, featuring Superboy's robot pal Percy from Superboy No 9:

As for the quiz part: just who does that robot eerily resemble?

Last chance to enter the Micro Contest! Next week: the winners!

The Stunning Continuation of John Buys Comics

World’s Finest No 4 (of 4)

I liked this series. I can completely get behind a relatively uncomplicated yarn featuring the various members of the Superman and Batman families teaming up, with giant robots, yet. Sure there were some tie-ins to the interminable ongoing shouldn’t-have-been-stretched-out-this-long stuff going on over in the Superman books, but hey, how could they avoid that? The only real sour note was that they revisited that fun trend whereby since Stephanie Brown theoretically isn’t built like a supermodel then making cracks about her being fat or having small breasts or whatever is fair game. I think that I wouldn't be quite as enraged by it if she wasn’t drawn with exactly the same body as Supergirl, but how will I ever know?. Of course, if I started basing these reviews on realistic depictions of the female (or even human) form then I would quickly go mad.

I was going to say that it would have been really neat if they’d made this series quarterly and had the fourth issue be the triumphant return of both Superman and Batman, but I think that Superman might be coming back in a month or so, whereas Batman’s still a caveman, so that might be troublesome, scheduling-wise. I’ll take a Superman/Dick “Batman” Grayson team-up, no problem.

Several hours later, a thought occurs: they should have done a Jimmy Olsen/Commissioner Gordon team-up.

Demonic No. 1

This is the second of the “Pilot Season” books that Rober Kirkman and Mark Silvestri are doing at Top Cow. Last week was Murderer, about a man who has to kill to silence his telepathy and who kills to help people. This week: Demonic, about a man compelled to either murder criminals or to kill his wife and daughter. Once the other three books (Stealth, Stellar and Hardcore, presumably about people who are afflicted by how quiet, bright and eXtreme they are, but manage to do good anyway) have come out then you’ll be able to vote for them on the Top Cow website, with the winner becoming a miniseries. So far, my money’s on Murderer, not only because it’s got the best name of the bunch but because the protagonist of that book spent most of the issue carefully selecting someone bad enough to kill before carefully killing him, while Demonic mostly carved up police officers, and precision is a lot more fun to read about than Demon Wolverine.

Batman and Robin No. 7 - Morrison’s collection of British super-villains are pretty great - here’s hoping that they all don’t just end up as crowd scene death fodder in a year or two. Even better is the sheer ballsiness of the dues ex machine that he pulled to get Batwoman on the scene. I must applaud it for its blatancy. Also: the Beefeater finally has a semi-dignified appearance.

Chew No. 8 - I had honestly never considered how a ban on chickens would affect the sport of cockfighting. Come, join me. Weep for the cockfighters (Don’t worry: all of the cockfighters get beaten up).

Victorian Undead No. 3 - Moriarty, eh? If Irene Adler shows up next issue then we’ll know that someone else has gotten ahold of the Sherlock Holmes Cliches Checklist.

Superman: Secret Origin No 4 (of 6) - Man, that is both the worst Jor-El design I have ever seen and the worst Fortress of Solitude design ever. I know that the Fortress is one of those instances of movie continuity creeping into the comics, but what about poor old Jor? I say bring back the headband model.

Afrodisiac: Whoops, I didn't get to read this before self-imposed presstime, but Dave reviewed the hell out of it earlier this week so I don't feel as bad as I might. I do have to say, after reading the categories listed on the back of the thing:  “Hip Hop”? Afrodisiac is about Hip Hop?  Or is it that this is the new “urban”?

No Jive Suckas Allowed

 Filmmakers have found a wealth of material to make great sport of in the Blaxploitation genre; the Wayans Brothers spoofed Superfly, Shaft, Black Belt Jones, and the like in 1988’s I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and Spawn and Dark Knight star Michael Jai White had a go at Soul Cinema in last year’s must-see indie Black Dynamite. Leslie Nielsen even got in on the act in a Seventies flashback segment of the third Naked Gun film, sporting an afro the size of a medicine ball. However, despite the prominence of afro-wearing superheroes in the 1970s (Luke Cage, Black Lightning, Black Goliath), most comics creators are eager to jettison the stereotypical baggage of that era, simultaneously updating and mainstreaming the characters (hence, Cage drops the tiara and ‘fro and joins the Avengers, etc.). Thankfully, cartoonist Jim Rugg and co-writer Brian Maruca have decided to embrace the tropes of the genre in their new AdHouse Books graphic novel Afrodisiac, and the result is a delicious throwback with a striking visual style and plenty of laughs.

 

The book’s titular character (spun off from his appearances in Street Angel) is a bell-bottomed, jive-talking, street-fighting superpimp endowed with trouble-alerting “Street Smarts”, as well as a way with the ladies. In a series of short strips (bookended by scarily accurate retro cover spoofs and pinups), Afrodisiac does battle with Dracula, Hercules, Richard Nixon, and a crazed supercomputer, even finding time to indulge in a sexy encounter with Death herself. Rugg and Maruca mock Marvel’s origin recaps in a series of first-page captions that offer an array of increasingly ridiculous and contradictory alternate origin stories for Afrodisiac, and at times, they even provide asterisked translations of the character’s street dialogue (much like Marvel did in a 1983 Falcon miniseries).

 

Rugg’s art recalls other indie favourites like David Lapham and Farel Dalrymple, but with its own easily recognizable idiosyncracies (Rugg has a gift for three-dimensional sound effects that fly like rubble during fight scenes, for instance). The lo-fi colour scheme evokes 1970s comics in a way that is not unlike Dan Clowes’ work on Eightball, and the spoof covers done in the style of Harvey and Gold Key comics for kids, romance books, and even Saturday morning cartoon intros, are dead on. Afrodisiac may not be for everybody—much of the dialogue and situations are not exactly politically correct—but if that doesn’t bother you, and you have a taste for retro silliness, throw on some Curtis Mayfield and enjoy this outta-sight gem.